Doing The Right Thing For 2012

April 06, 2011 2:14 pm ET by Kerry Eleveld

President Barack Obama
has just announced his 2012 bid for re-election and the inevitable push
for LGBT support - donor, voter, and activist - has begun. To be
sure, many LGBT Americans would much rather see Barack Obama still gracing
the Oval Office come January of 2013 than a Republican. And so, many of us are
faced with a familiar dilemma: should we sublimate our intrinsic desire to
continue advocating for full equality to the urgency of reelecting a man who
has presided over some of the greatest advances in the history of the LGBT
movement?

My answer: No.

This is not an either-or
proposition in my opinion, nor should we feel compelled to surrender our basic
humanity to the whims of the election cycle. That type of thinking is a relic
of days past when politicians held firmly to the notion that addressing LGBT
concerns would undoubtedly be a drag on their electability. What we have witnessed
over the past couple years is just the opposite. The repeal of "don't ask,
don't tell" scored huge points with President Obama's target voters -- independent,
moderate, and progressive alike - and his declaration that the discriminatory
Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional reestablished his ability to
show bold leadership.

Here's our new reality:
The right thing to do is also the popular thing to do.

But there is much more
work to be done and it would be an absolute mistake for LGBT advocates to
sit back and relax after the momentum generated by the DADT win and the push
toward DOMA's dissolution. The country is at a tipping point as evidenced by
multiple polls indicating voters are evenly divided if not leaning toward
support for same-sex marriage - a decent barometer for our overall acceptance
since marriage equality has also been one of our most contentious issues.

Laying out constructive
and achievable goals for the administration over the course of the next year
could very well help materialize meaningful advances for all members of the
queer community. The good news is, LGBT advocacy groups and President Obama
himself generally agree on the means by which we can achieve these gains.

When the president
outlined his priorities for the LGBT community in our interview last December,
he acknowledged that legislative wins seemed unlikely over the
next couple years but he also repeatedly emphasized his ability to use his
executive power to make administrative changes within the
federal government.

"[L]et me just say
there are still a lot of things we can do administratively even if we don't
pass things legislatively," he said. "So my ability to make sure that the federal
government is an employer that treats gays and lesbians fairly, that's
something I can do, and sets a model for folks across the board."

At the outset of the
Obama administration, both the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the
Human Rights Campaign provided the Obama transition team with a lengthy list of
recommendations -- mostly for actions by individual agency level -- that would vastly
improve the lives of LGBT Americans and could be accomplished entirely at the
discretion of the president via executive action.

"For the lesbian, gay,
bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community, the election of a fair-minded
president provides vast opportunities to advance equality in material ways on
an accelerated timetable," read the opening sentence of HRC's Blue
Print for Positive Change, which was provided to incoming administration officials in
December of 2008.

The documents were thorough and exhaustive, with HRC's
running around 25 pages and NGLTF's coming in at over 200 pages and, while some of the initiatives outlined in these policy
papers have been accomplished, the vast majority of them remain either
untouched or only partially addressed. In fact, after laying out approximately
80 initiatives in its New Beginnings Initiative, NGLTF lists only nine
accomplishments on its success tracker page, which was
set up to follow how many administrative actions have been taken by the
administration.

The truth is, it's
difficult to present a one-for-one comparison of how many "asks" either organization
made and how many were actually achieved because most of the actions the
administration has taken don't directly correspond to what was asked of them. I
also believe that getting caught up in an accounting of "wins" is a
distraction. Overall, it's fair to say that more could clearly be done and the
broader point is that leaving pro-equality changes up to the individual Cabinet
secretaries of each federal agency is not a good way to achieve government-wide
advances.

Instead, we should
concentrate our efforts on five broader initiatives that would incorporate many
of the recommendations originally presented by NGLTF and HRC, but in a more
comprehensive way. Of the suggestions made by NGLTF, for instance, over half of
them took a piecemeal approach to providing nondiscrimination protections at
the agency level as well as making those agencies more inclusive in areas such
as data
collection, definitions, and research.

Rather than assembling a
patchwork of progress agency by agency, President Obama should issue executive
orders or amend existing ones that set a government-wide precedent for equality
in the following ways:

1) Directing the
federal government to include LGBT Americans in all federal level data
collection efforts.

2) Mandating that all
federal contractors must have policies providing nondiscrimination protections
for their employees on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

3) Prohibiting federal
funds from being used to discriminate against LGBT Americans.

4) Prohibiting
discrimination against military service members on the basis of their sexual
orientation or gender identity.

5) Adding gender
identity protections to President Clinton's executive order 13087, which
protected civilian federal workers from bias based on their sexual orientation.

Parsing The Prescription

While some of these
executive actions may seem a little wonky, let me make a few quick observations.

Not having substantive
data on LGBT Americans serves as a constant handicap for any advocate
attempting to provide federal services to the queer community in all sectors ranging from health care to
housing to education. Just last week, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released
a comprehensive report on health disparities in which they noted: "Because demographic data
provide the foundation for understanding any population's status and needs,
federally funded surveys should proactively collect data on sexual orientation
and gender identity, just as they routinely gather information on race and ethnicity."

John Podesta, president
and CEO of the influential Center for American Progress, deemed the compilation
of numbers so important that he called collecting LGBT data in federal surveys "essential"
within his executive order recommendations for the White House following the November
2010 elections.

If you doubt the
efficacy of data collection, just look at "don't ask, don't tell." One of the
factors that set it apart from other pieces of LGBT equality legislation was
the fact that discharges were tracked every year by the Pentagon, giving repeal
advocates the power of tangible and widely reported numbers to reference during
the debate.

Similar to data
collection, requiring all governmental contractors to have LGBT discrimination
protections would have sweeping effects far beyond the federal government.
While federal employees comprise about
1.4 percent of the nation's workers according to the Partnership for Public Service, federal
contractors employ
approximately 22 percent of the American workforce according to the
U.S. Department of Labor.

Colorado Congressman
Jared Polis last week endorsed the idea of an executive order requiring federal
contractors to have LGBT job bias protections, according to the Washington
Blade. The president has strongly supported the principle of fair employment
practices and the administration's transition website even pledged that
President Obama would pass the Employment Non-Discrimination
Act. Since that piece of legislation is sure to languish for the next two years
in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, the president should
promptly embrace the opportunity to do everything in his power to supply those
protections through the executive branch.

The same is true for
codifying gender identity protections via executive order. Though transgender
workers have been written into the Equal Employment Opportunity guidelines of
the Office of Personnel Management (the human resources department for the
federal government), an executive order would carry far more substantive and
symbolic weight.

Finally, prohibiting
the government from using federal funds to discriminate against LGBT tax payers
might seem unnecessary at first blush, but the White House Office of
Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships -- created during the Bush
administration and continued by President Obama -- has funding tentacles that
stretch across America, sometimes touching rabidly homophobic organizations
through grants that often go undetected.

While some reporting
has already uncovered discriminatory abuses of federal funding, this is an area
still ripe for inquiry. But for starters, Andy Kopsa of the Washington
Independent documented the Iowa
Family Policy Center, which publicly opposes same-sex marriage in the Hawkeye
state, receiving more than $3 million in federal funding for its Marriage
Matters program from 2004 through 2009 - a portion of which will continue to be
dispersed through 2011.

Kopsa also reported that Project
SOS, a Jacksonville-based outfit that teaches abstinence-only programming in
public schools, received $454,000 in federal funding in September 2010. The
curriculum taught by Project SOS has been called into question by multiple
education organizations for relaying misinformation about HIV and AIDS.

With an executive
order, President Obama could put a definitive end to this questionable
conflation of church and state by following through on his campaign promise to
end discriminatory practices in federal funding, especially where faith-based
organizations are concerned.

"If you get a federal grant, you
can't use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can't
discriminate against them — or against the people you hire — on the basis of
their religion," Obama said during a 2008 speech in Zanesville, Ohio. "Federal dollars that go
directly to churches, temples and mosques can only be used on secular programs."

One glaring omission among the
initiatives I have presented here is anything having to do with HIV/AIDS. This
is an area that has become highly specialized and I believe there are people
far more qualified than I to weigh in on overall funding levels as well as how
that money should be allocated and to what effect.

A Higher Standard

President Obama has
amassed a lot of goodwill with progressive voters and LGBT constituents alike
through his accomplishments for equality during the first half of his
administration, but this is no time for equality advocates to relax into
complacency. I am reminded that immediately following the signing of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, civil rights leaders went straight back to the streets,
demanding that they be recognized as full citizens in every walk of American
life.

In my opinion, LGBT
advocates must be more vigilant and discerning than ever now. After the Institute of Medicine
(IOM) released its report recommending more data collection on the LGBT
population, for instance, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen
Sebelius issued a statement lauding the
content as an "important step in identifying research gaps and opportunities."
Data collection would arguably have the greatest impact of any innovation that
could presently be made at HHS, but the department's press release gave no
concrete commitments about how HHS would take action on the new intelligence.
Sebelius said only, "We look forward to continuing our work to address these
needs and reduce LGBT health disparities."

Some advocates will
surely say I'm being nit-picky, that I'm simply looking for ways to poke at the
administration. But I am not looking to diminish the administration's sizeable
accomplishments to date. Rather I would like to hold them and us - as advocates
- to a higher standard.

We did not achieve
"don't ask, don't tell" repeal by being satisfied with White House Easter Egg
roll invitations and passing mentions in a handful of speeches. Now is the time
for the president to employ his considerable executive powers to effect a government-wide
culture change that will trickle down to every corner of America. Let's not
squander this opportunity to squeeze as much goodness out of this
administration as possible, which in turn will help President Obama secure four
more years in office.